Dreams of Rivers and Seas

by Tim Parks

  ‘Just dying to see you,’ he said. ‘I did send a message.’

  ‘I had my phone off,’ she said sharply.

  She seemed to spend an unnecessarily long time in the bathroom. John almost fell asleep again. Finally, she came to the side of the bed, but then turned away. ‘Look at this. There’s a bit of the play that goes into mime. There’s a big explosion, then I have to move in a sort of trance. Only I can’t get it right.’

  She took off her skirt, and began to step around the small room in just her pants and tee-shirt. Her arms flowed from side to side, brushing the bookshelves. Her face was bright with concentration.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he told her.

  ‘Sshhh! I’m in the aftermath of this terrible explosion.’

  She was looking for something, in the distance now, up in the air, down beneath her feet. She stretched, she crouched. She was very still, then very fluid. John ached. It was almost 2 a.m.

  ‘You know my uncle wrote a play,’ he said. ‘Seems when no one wanted to put it on, he killed himself.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Elaine stopped.

  John laughed nervously. ‘They wouldn’t put his play on, my uncle’s, and there was some bust-up with his girlfriend and my grandfather. He killed himself.’

  ‘But John! God! When?’

  ‘It was before I was born.’

  ‘Oh, so why are you telling me now?’

  ‘Ellie. I really want to marry you,’ he said. ‘I’m crazy about you.’

  The girl frowned. ‘You can’t just say these mad things.’

  ‘Why not? It’s what I feel.’

  ‘I’ve just got this part, John,’ she said softly. ‘I need to concentrate. There’s a scene where everyone is blown up. I lose my child.’

  ‘Well concentrate! I’ll support you every way I can.’

  ‘Jo, we’re twenty-three!’

  ‘Twenty-four,’ he said. He propped himself on his elbow. ‘We’re adults, aren’t we? It will help with our work, not hinder. We’ll be a team.’

  She stood by the bed lifting herself up and down on her toes. ‘You didn’t tell me what you thought about the mime. When I move fast like that I’m supposed to be being blown about. But also revisiting my past. Look.’

  She repeated the movement, spinning round the room. Then one hand struck the wardrobe.

  ‘Ow!’ She examined her knuckles. ‘Hanyaki says I’m too obvious. I look like an actor miming.’

  ‘He’s Japanese? The director?’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ She laughed. ‘John relax, you’re so wired up. If we stay together a year or two then maybe we could talk about getting serious. Who knows?’

  ‘So let’s live together.’

  She gave him a puzzled smile and sat in the chair by her desk swivelling this way and that.

  ‘Was he the guy who drove you home?’ John asked. ‘I thought you’d gone in your car.’

  ‘It’s on the way for him.’ She smiled. ‘And my present?’

  ‘When I unpacked I found it was broken.’

  ‘So you didn’t bring it? Oh John! All promises and then nothing!’

  Raising her nose in the air, Elaine swivelled the chair away from him in mock disappointment. John jumped from the bed and grabbed her. His hands went round to cover her breasts. His face pressed hard in her hair. The chair turned as he tried to pull her off it. She struggled.

  ‘Hey!’

  His hands gripped very hard. The smell had woken something animal. ‘Come on Ellie.’ He began to force her.

  ‘John! Shit.’

  ‘Come on!’

  He had her standing and was tugging at her shirt. It tore.

  ‘Stop it!’ Her elbow caught his neck. ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Ellie?’ a girl’s voice called. There were footsteps on the landing.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS READING Wau that had enabled Paul Roberts to divorce. ‘Your book was a catalyst for change and liberation in my life,’ he had written in his initial letter to Albert James. ‘I would like to pass on your therapeutic vision to a wider public.’

  ‘Liberation from what into what?’ James had replied.

  In the luxury surroundings of the Ashoka, Paul Roberts scrolled up his notes on the screen of his laptop.

  Albert (after Einstein) William (after Blake) James.

  Born into one of England’s foremost scientific families.

  Brought up atheist. Rather: science a religion. Father involved in the field of genetics. Aggressive polemicist. Also highly cultured. Visits to plays, opera. Owned original paintings by major artists (Munch, Braque). In postscript to Wau, James quotes father as saying art a higher form of achievement unavailable to scientific James family.

  Elder sister Amelia killed by drunk driver while celebrating double first in botany and chemistry.

  James fourteen.

  Elder brother, John, refuses to study sciences, drinks, gambles, womanises. Falls in love with Irish beauty, Bridget MacDowell, who lives with him three months before running off, apparently with older man. Fierce quarrels with father about money. Writes poems, novels, plays. Without success. Father cuts off allowance. John cuts wrists in the bathroom of the National Theatre.

  James seventeen.

  Parental expectations all on third child, previously considered dull boy. First in biology. Fieldwork, amoebas. Tells tutor he is unhappy with impersonal nature of formal science. Meets highly politicised young doctor, Helen Sommers. Marriage and mission of medical help in Third World.

  James twenty-seven.

  Kenya. Laos. Borneo. Metamorphosis. James abandons biology and medical philanthropy for anthropology. Writes Wau. Birth of John James.

  Paul frowned. He had read Wau by accident. Who would have dreamed of reading a work that spent 500 pages examining a bizarre ceremony played out between nephews and their maternal uncles in a remote tribe of headhunters? Paul had been into Gandhi at the time and was writing a series of articles for the Globe exploring opportunities for non-violent civil resistance in contemporary America. Meantime he was fighting with his second wife. He was fighting off a mistress. There was a pretty Chinese girl. ‘Since you’re on an exotic trip,’ remarked the arts editor, ‘how about checking this?’ He handed Paul a review copy. Neither journalist had heard of the publisher.

  ‘Why are literary descriptions of a culture more satisfying than scientific analyses,’ Wau began, ‘while scientific analyses are nevertheless felt to be more “useful”? Can the two be merged, or are they mutually exclusive, like contemplation and action?’

  Albert James then proceeded to talk in seemingly random detail about a group of people who lived in huts perched on stilts in swamps, fishing, gathering sago, memorising long lists of ancestral names, competing to see who could carry out the most painful initiation ceremonies on their adolescent children, delighting in homicide whenever they could. ‘It has never been clear to me,’ James had written, ‘why I should pursue one detail rather than another; there is a unity of ethos in the way the hunter prepares an arrow, the way his wife squats by the cooking pot, a child is invited to push a spear into the belly of a defenceless prisoner.’ To demonstrate the fact, James had filled the pages with photos, though here the most obvious unifying factor was the poor quality of the images.

  Paul Roberts had been unable to understand at first why this bizarre book had affected him so profoundly. There was no way in which the puritan obsessions of his mother and wife, the possessive aggression of his lover, could be compared to the weird behaviour patterns of a bunch of savages. But for the first time it occurred to him how far his own identity and behaviour was caught up in a pattern of disguised rituals. He was constantly transgressing a long list of dos and don’ts, but always in secret and always feeling sufficiently guilty to step back from any decision that would really offend the status quo. All your rebellion, the journalist told himself – and at this point he had discovered James’s earlier work Mythical Individuals – is a theatre
of rebellion, foreseen in the script your culture has been playing out for generations. You do nothing but play naughty boy. It was time to get real, Paul thought.

  In a coda to Wau, James had described the devastating effect on the tribe when a group of young men who had gone to Australia to work in copper mines eventually returned and failed to observe the rules. They casually let slip the taboo names of family totems. They did not feel the need to keep their musical instruments perpetually hidden from their womenfolk. ‘The whole complex structure of the tribe’s life was brushed away,’ James had written, ‘like a spider’s web in a puff of wind. Though, as we know, the spider is indefatigable in rebuilding his web.’

  ‘The liberation your book brought me,’ Paul had responded to his mentor’s provocation, ‘lay in its revelation of the mesh of relations that bound me in an unhappy and unproductive situation.’

  ‘Strange,’ James replied – he used a minuscule italic typeface which made reading his emails rather difficult – ‘unhappy situations are usually the most productive.’

  Seven years after Wau, in Chicago, James had come up with the theory that brought him brief notoriety: a schematic classification of family structures and type conflicts that could lead to corresponding neuroses: anorexia, compulsions, phobias. Seized on by therapists as a powerful tool, Systems and Sanity was pilloried by family associations and drug companies. James had been doing everything he could to distance himself from the controversy, declaring his book more a work of aesthetics than psychology – most of the examples he had given were from novels, not life – when two policemen arrived at his home to question him about claims made by a fifteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl.

  Paul glanced again through the folder in which he had saved their correspondence. It had been tantalising. Albert James had a habit of replying at once, within minutes, or only after a lapse of three or four weeks. He could be telegraphic or tediously verbose. ‘By all means take on my ideas, but please don’t exhume my corpse,’ was his first reaction to the proposed biography. Was he already ill? Paul wondered now. Asked what he was working on at present, James had answered: ‘The Land of Faery’. Pressed, he had come back with a Word enclosure of some forty pages of highly technical considerations on the nature of spiders’ webs. ‘The determining difference between spiders and their victims,’ he concluded, ‘is that while the former move easily within the sticky pattern they have created – something science has yet fully to explain – the latter cannot, or not until they have become one, as it were, with the spider, or his innards.’

  ‘Everything you tell me,’ Paul had replied, ‘makes me more eager to go ahead with this book.’

  But the man remained elusive. Paul had rushed to Delhi when he received a message from Albert James’s email account: ‘MR ALBERT PASSED ON. CREMATION AT ENGLISH CEMETERY.’ ‘Could you let me know who sent this?’ he replied from his BlackBerry, already at the airport. There had been no response. Paul had spoken at length to Sharmistha Puri and her companion Heinrich in their apartment in Saket, but Sharmistha explained she had only communicated with Albert by phone, or at the weekly meetings of the research team she was writing for. He had mentioned being ill and there had been two or three long absences, but she had had no idea where he was being treated or what was wrong with him.

  ‘He was a man’ – and here the handsome woman ran her tongue over gleaming teeth – ‘who always wanted to know about you. About others. He never spoke of himself.’

  ‘Wonderful listener,’ Heinrich put in. ‘Came along to my psychiatric ward a few times. He would just sit down with patients and listen for hours. He’d even listen when they spoke in Bengali or Gujarati, which he didn’t know at all. He’d always tell me to stop giving them drugs and leave them alone.’

  The German was tall, lean, earnest and polite, with a way of bursting into loud laughter. His greying eyebrows were formidable. Sitting on cushions beside him, her back resting on the wall, Sharmistha had a composed, somehow furtive beauty, her head always cocked to one side. ‘When he asked you about your life,’ she explained, ‘you understood that he was feeling for patterns, trying out hypotheses. What was strange was how you couldn’t help but cooperate. He’d say, “You must treat me as if I wasn’t really here, Sharmistha.”’

  ‘You do know he used to ask if he could set up a video camera at dinner parties and things?’ Heinrich shook his head ‘Just set it up and let it run. Like a security camera.’

  ‘Come to think of it,’ Sharmistha chuckled: ‘Albert was probably the only man aside from my father who never tried to seduce me.’

  ‘Oh, but he seduced you completely!’ Heinrich came back and slapped his leg enthusiastically. ‘You were in love with him, Shasha! And he with you! And his son did the same right after the funeral! First meeting, you couldn’t resist the boy.’

  ‘Albert charmed everyone,’ Sharmistha agreed.

  Paul Roberts watched the couple. From time to time they exchanged knowing smiles. An age difference of about twenty years, he guessed. But they were unable to recount a single specific anecdote that he could put in his book, nothing Albert James had actually done. ‘Was he a help in your work?’ he asked the woman.

  Sharmistha frowned. ‘You know, my job is just to turn this spider project into an interesting book. A spin-off, if you’ll excuse the pun. Talking to Albert, you felt he was giving you fantastic ideas. Was the spider exclusively interested in catching flies, or was there an aesthetic investment in the web per se, or even an aesthetic rivalry between spiders: who can make the neatest web, sort of thing? Or the most mesmerising web? Was there a comfort factor about being inside a web? What was the relationship between the world around the web and the web itself? Did they interact? How did the spider feel passing from one to the other? Did the spider gloat over his prey, or did he take free food for granted and perhaps not associate the trapped flies with the purpose of web-building at all? Did he eat them merely to stop them messing up his web? Was it possible to find individual traits within the species’ common pattern of web construction, and if so, why? Does a spider differentiate himself from other spiders? How? Did different angles in the web create different patterns of vibrations when the whole was disturbed and how did the spider experience that?’

  Sharmistha laughed. ‘Albert could go on forever. I mean it. Perhaps sometimes he was just kidding. Anyway, when I got back to writing the book, I realised he’d only made everything more complicated. To get anything done I had to forget every word he said.’

  The young woman smiled, hands perfectly still on the emerald green sari covering her legs. There was a fine silkiness to her skin where chin met neck beneath elaborately worked silver earrings. Paul couldn’t decide whether to envy Heinrich or to pity him.

  It became difficult now for the American to know how to use his time in Delhi. He had meant to come here and get Albert’s life story out of him in a series of interviews. He had just applied for and procured his visa when the email arrived announcing the man’s death. It was some days before Paul realised how profoundly this had altered his project. To have heard details and ideas from the man’s lips was one thing; to reconstruct them through research was quite another. This could not be like the Gandhi biography where he had merely applied his skills as journalist and philosophy major to offer his own take on material that had already been written about a thousand times. On the contrary, no one really knew much about James. In the public domain there were only the books (remarkable), the articles (curious) and some conference papers (baffling). So now he was no longer there to be interviewed, it was obviously essential to get the cooperation of the woman he had spent his life with. But you mustn’t hurry her, Paul told himself. You mustn’t be ghoulish.

  On the other hand, Paul Roberts wasn’t the kind of man who wanted to spend too long on one project. James had become an object of veneration for him; he would love to turn the man into a cult figure; but a book remained a commercial enterprise. Paul was a doer. Staying in India, he wa
s missing a girlfriend, missing visits to his children. If things went slowly, he would grow restless.

  How to get going, then? Albert James’s son had disappeared almost before the biographer had realised he was there. Talking to him would mean a trip to London. He could do that on the way back to the States perhaps. In the meantime, he made a preparatory phone call, then followed Sharmistha’s directions to the home of the Theosophical Society, in a quiet street by Rosnahara Garden. The weather was warming. Beyond the low wall of the garden there were trees in orange blossom.

  Dr Bhagwan Coomaraswamy had only ever spoken to Albert James, he said, at the society’s monthly gatherings. ‘Yes, here, in this very place.’

  Dressed in a white tunic, the Indian flapped a limp arm at walls of bookshelves and dark wooden furniture. Paul was surprised by the size of the place, the number of people, old and young, bent over mahogany tables consulting old periodicals and making notes. There was a colonial feel to the marble busts of eminent men in dusty corners.

  ‘Professor James’s ambition,’ Dr Coomaraswamy pronounced in a high-pitched, throaty voice, ‘was to explore the territory of the shaman with the tools and thought processes of the scientist. You know?’

  The doctor smiled queerly over his spectacles. Doctor of what? Paul wondered. The two were standing together in the middle of the room. The American hadn’t been invited to sit down.

  ‘Albert had a vocation for arduous paths, Mr Roberts. Admirable and fruitless.’

  ‘Why do you think James came to Delhi?’ Paul asked.

  Dr Coomaraswamy pondered. There was an evasive benevolence to the man that was irksome and somehow at one with his neatly ironed tunic, the smell of freshly shaven skin, a certain unassailable complacency in blinking eyes behind rimless glasses.

  ‘Perhaps the answer,’ the Indian eventually said, ‘lies in a comment Albert once made to me vis-à-vis our recent history here. Partition, you know, the massacre of so many Muslims. He said Delhi was a city where he was constantly reminded of violence, yet never felt personally threatened: he wasn’t part of our quarrel.’